The game is not that hard, if youre okay with dying a couple of times you can probably do everything in the game without putting to much effort into it. But that’s not to say everything you do will be good, especially when you go to high corruption levels like 800~1000 or try to fight Aberroth. Some people also just dont want to die even on softcore, and find it annoying to play constantly having to dodge everything in the screen manually.
Vegence idols just give you up to 54% increased dmg each at max and i dont think they are that easy to find with high rolls. Most of its dmg modifiers are conditional and not that high, and its base attack speed is also not that good. But all that said, i never tried too hard to deal dmg with vengence, just because the other melee skills like rive always seemed like a better option, maybe it does some dmg but i can confidently say you probably need to invest a lot to get it to the same level as the meta skills, this is the same even for rive, it being one of the best melee skills in the game.
One big point vengence have is the defensive layer it adds and the global more dmg node, its pretty good thats why i like to use it to procc other stuff like Healing Hands.
Ideally there would just be more contest over stats.
You cant get flat damage on rings, and the % damage on rings is low, so what are gonna replace the crit with? an attribute? some fluff % damage? weapons have more contest for options but all the other slots it feels like when you remove the crit, what you get in return isnt enough to justify it.
However I feel like adding “% extra damage with no crits” is just as boring as singularity. So id rather just see the option to have all the damage stats present on most slots so its always a question of “what am i gaining by giving up crit” rather the just focusing on a “i didnt plan to build crit anyways so these affixes that only work for my build are no brainers”
What? No this is wrong, Singularity only applies to HIT damage, not DoT and not Ailments.
AFAIK that shouldn’t double dip as it should only consider % inc physical damage specifically (and not even % inc melee physical damage). In cases where generic % inc damage is included it is specified (For example Vortex Pennant).
I dunno I don’t think Sentinel is that bad, I do agree on the lack of DR but the consistent 70-80% armor DR due to its easy access is not negligible and 2 sources of armor mit DoT help a lot (glove base, relic or helmet). I have even hit 1000 corruption on a DW Sentinel (although it is a bit glass cannon).
There’s other ways to get base crit on a spell Sentinel as well for example Prismatic Gaze helmet, Locket of the Forgotten Knight for void spells and Logi’s Hunger for fire spells.
But Crit as a whole is kinda problematic for Sentinel (ever since the Lunge nerfs a long long time ago) and I think this class is one that would benefit the most from some non-crit hit damage scaling.
Like I don’t wanna be mean here but that build is a kinda bad example and does not look very optimal to me. Its using the shield that procs Mark for Death on you and he doesn’t seem to even cleanse it and doesn’t have resist overcap meaning he is typically not res capped. He isn’t using the Transfusing mod on his wand which would give him more mana(for damage) as well as ward. Also no Frailty which is like a free 15% DR.
Yes, VC is converted from Void to Fire, and then any % modifiers are applied.
% Fire is applied as usual.
% Physical is applied due to the passive.
I didn’t actually explore how does % melee behave in terms of this passive, but I can use Avatar of War or Conviction class passives as another example that gives both % increased Physical and % increased Fire.
That was kinda the point of the showcase.
I showed him that non-optimal builds exist and clear corruption above 300. And I showed him that even skills that are “easier” to crit cap are still being used without crit cap.
Again, you cannot.
You give something away in order to have that crit. Smite with 5 points in crit won’t have another % more damage multiplier or lightning conversion. For Divine Bolts crit, you give away gear bases, affixes or both.
Well, it sounds like you are both too lazy to build crit and also too lazy to use Singularity, so instead you just assumed it’s bad without actually thinking about it
It’s not, but let’s say it is. So, you just traded two T5 affix slots to gain (on average) the same benefit as if you were using a Singularity.
So now you’re -2 affix slots, and you gained nothing. You see the benefit yet?
And in those cases, you can compare if Singularity would be better, or easier to get running. It sure won’t always be better, but just because there is a situation where crit is better than Singularity doesn’t mean Singularity is bad.
So…it’s a lot easier to swap attack speed for crit, but it’s also “non negligible” to swap attack speed for crit. So which is it?
And apparently Spellcasting Sentinel cannot use Daggers, because … someone’s idea of … something. Got it. But Wands and magic Skulls are fine?
I’m afraid you’ve been a victim of a practical joke.
No, Sentinel is not the squishiest class there is. That would probably be Acolyte.
Sentinel’s best layer of defense is Armor. Sentinel is the only class that can have armor mitigation fully applied to Damage over Time, and Sentinel can also easily stack another layer of defense along with Armor - if the user decides to do so.
I’ll watch the video for entertainment purposes later.
It doesn’t matter if you rush to Abby with a Static Orb Mage or a Smite Paladin, or a different “worse” build, all of them will end at the same spot you’re describing, because there’s no other content afterwards to optimise for.
But that’s called a lack of content, and it doesn’t say anything about what kind or how many builds a class has.
I don’t know if you thought about this enough, but … if you’re set on a skill setup and on a gear setup, and the only thing you’re switching are selected few affixes from crit to non-crit, you’re playing the same build. This won’t give you new alternative ways to play classes.
That isn’t a requirement, and my choice of a “not perfect” build was on purpose. Think about it.
That is also on purpose, this time from Aaron himself
Then I’d say the example served its purpose.
Yeah, your reality seems to be slightly different from most other people replying to you here.
It’s only ever added into the damage calculation once.
But those modifiers are only ever used in the damage calculation once for their respective flat damage. The passive might give more wide ranging benefits elementally speaking than, say, some in Void Knight that only affect void but I’d expect the more narrowly focussed passives to have higher numbers (10% v 5%, say) or some other affect (maybe crit chance or a defensive mod).
I think the devs have been quite careful to not allow double dipping. The “worst” you’re likely to get is a modifier that’s multiplicative when it shouldn’t be or something like the area/radius shenanigans that Rogue had fixed.
The passive literally says: “Your increases to physical damage also apply to fire damage for Void Cleave.”. So no, the Physical modifier is used in the damage calculation for a different flat damage type.
Avatar of War has % fire increase that’s applied to Fire, which increases the damage of VC, then the same % physical increase is applied to Fire, which also increases the damage of VC. That’s double dipping from Avatar of War.
Watched Perry’s video, it went about as I expected.
Basically, his example Sentinel is not allowed to build defenses, but all other comparison builds are allowed to do so, and a conclusion is drawn that Sentinel’s eHP ceiling is lower, therefore “Sentinel is squishy”.
He linked some planners in the description, but I’m not sure what they are supposed to be. Some of them have HP and armor values that he used, but you won’t find the attributes he entered into the eHP calculation there. The resistances, the 12k dodge, the 15k ward.
It should be very obvious why his video is misleading.
He’s comparing a semi-glass cannon build to builds with maxed out defenses, multiple layers of defenses, or quadruple HP total. Maybe Perry from 1,5 years ago needed to watch some Aaron videos and learn how to build defenses on his Sentinels
Either way, today the video is old and some of the premises are no longer relevant. Namely the 15k ward Glacier, the Primalist DR stack, the permanent Flame Ward DR, perhaps others too. So don’t be like Perry from the past, stack Armor on Sentinel.
Maybe I’m wrong but crit and crit dmg are just two additional multipliers on top of all the other stuff that scales dmg. So every % of added or increased dmg scales dmg. I wouldn’t say there is no way to scale dmg when there are plenty or do I miss something here?
So a simple example is, getting 100% increased damage and 50% attack speed results in 2x damage, and 1.5x attack rate, which is 3x dps. 2 * 1.5 = 3
getting 150% inc damage instead is only 2.5x damage. So generally diversifying your modifiers is better.
like if you have either 600% inc damage, and capped crit, vs 900% inc damage and no crit, the build with capped crit is doing 14x base damage (1 + 6) x 2, where as the 900% inc damage build is only doing 10x, so even getting 50% extra of raw damage stats, its far behind. if we include singularity, its only 12x multiplier still with max rolled one.
This is all because the different mechanics multiply together rather then simply adding so every multiplier beyond the first is just so much more oomph. Crit especially is a huge multiplier.
it also explains why cooldown skills can feel really terrible as well, they dont scale with speeds so they are automatically worse then ones that do unless they have really extra juiced numbers because they are missing an entire scaling vector.
Even in PoE which has much more powerful non crit options, if the build CAN go crit, it usually does at any level of investment past early game. Even skills with like 0% base crit like herald of thunder will shove base crit into it through weird means to get it to go crit. or skills like hexblast with 4%, because missing out on crit is just frankly not an option if you wanna do the big boy damage.
It’s part of the reason I am making a challenge build with a bleed stacking acolyte. So far it’s been a nightmare to scale bleed damage.
Mainly because you can’t - from my knowledge- add base damage to ailments. You can increase its duration to make it strike more times. But you can’t make them hit harder.
Closest I come to scaling bleed is to increase how fast the ticks, tick and make the bleeds last longer- as well as stacking penetration and damage over time.
You can, that’s what % increased physical & % increased DoT damage are for. Then you’ll want more hit rate for the applying skill and as many more modifiers that aren’t limited to hit damage as possible (as these will affect the applied DoTs).
Given Acolytes has a DoT focus as well as lots of bleed/phys conversions I’d have thought that making a bleed Acolyte (probably Warlock, but maybe Lich) would have been a relatively easy ask.
If you’re in melee range then you could use taste of blood to double the speed (but halve the duration) which might help but I’d have thought a spell like Rip Blood, Chaos Bolts, Chthonic Fissure would have been more useful than going Harvest (unless you’re using Chaos Bolts to proc Harvest but then you’d need to stack some dex to get that proc ). There’s also Salt the Wound to allow you to benefit from vrit multi.
Yes i am using salt of the wound. And Unyielding. Shame i cant duel wield, since i would love to use Taste of Blood.
As for skills. I chose harvest because i wanted to try to make a martial warlock that hit with his weapon. I know its not the way your supposed to really run it- but it can kind of work. It can kill 340C easily, can do about 550, i just not grinded far enough. Using cathonic fissure is just boring, so i used it as a way to extend bleed by 40% and stack bleeds while moving around.
I aint killing Aboreth with it purely due to lack of proper ward tools. I got him to 80% in about 3s, before i got one shot by a 7K hit (5K over my HP).
Its fine as i got a lot further then i anticipated.
So fun story, we used to have increased ailment effect which scaled the base damage and basically acted as an additional multiplier for ailments on top of the regular More damage multipliers which they inherit from skills or gear. I feel it was a balanced option since hit damage had the same multipliers as DoT (attack/cast speed, %damage, more damage, penetration) and an additional multiplier from crit which was much more accessible than ailment effect.
However, in 0.9 i think all sources of ailment effect was replaced with penetration instead which was a pretty rough nerf to ailments as a whole. There are still many good ailment builds but they are much more reliant on more damage multipliers from the proccing skill now.
The commutation principle says hi. It’s probably not the best idea to say things that will get people confused (ailment base damage doesn’t get modified), ailment effect was just a separate modifier to % increased damage hence it acted like a more modifier (in the same way attack speed does).
My english isnt that great so sorry if i’m mistaken, but i got from your comment that you dont know exactly the difference between Increased and More dmg.
TLDR.; You can live without one or two sources of increased dmg, but almost every source of more damage usually make some difference (And critical hits act the same as more damage modifiers, while also being huge in numbers).
So the way it works is all sources of “%Increased damage” that would affect your damage are summed up toghether before multiplying your damage.
If you are scaling Bleed for example, anything that scales Physical and DoT, and generic increased damage like from your attributes or affixes like "%Increased Damage with Hammer Throw (Assuming your damage comes from hammer throw), they all are summed up before multiplying your base+added damage. Thats why i usually say incresead dmg starts to get diminishing returns if you already have some amount, but they are still really good especially if you can get in big numbers.
On the other hand all sources of “%More damage” are multiplicative with each other, which means they will multiply your base+added damage by themselves, and will always multiply your damage by the number showed on the node/affix, so they will always have the same value for the player, even if you already have multiple sources of it (Even if you decide not to take it if you think you already have enough dmg).
Critical Hits, Penetration/Resistence Shred,Attack/Cast Speed (CDR in case the skill has a Cooldown) and debuffs such as increased damage taken on monsters will work somewhat that same way as more damage modifiers. Crits will straight up multiply your damage by your critical multiplier. Penetration and Resistence Shred will penetrate the monster resistence, which increases with Zone Level and stops at 75% like the player, but can be negative, which means over 75% penetration will still give you more damage, but just be aware penetration and res shred affect the same thing. Amour Shred also reduces your target defense layer and also count as a multiplier. Attack/Cast speed and CDR will increase the number of times you can use your skill which means more hits per second and more dmg. And lastly some builds can debuff your target and make them take increased damage, which in this case will also act as a more multiplyer because it is not summed together with your sources of increased damage.
Of all of those crit is usually the best because of the straight up big number, by default is 200% and you can increased it to sometimes get really big numbers like 600~700%. But as i said before, because all the others also multiply your damage seperatly you will always want to have as many of those as possible.
I agree with you actually, although i still think sentinel is the squishiest class, i think it got better on avarage in last patchs. But it got better mostly because of new uniques and new armour base types, and the uniques are not sentinel only so all other classes also got better defenses on avarege.
Sentinel is mostly squishy when compared to other classes and for me that is bad because it feel like it was supposed to be the tanky class.
Although the armor is def a great defensive layer and sentinel does have access to a good amount % of Armor applied to DoT, i dont think its enough for you to feel confident against it (But its mostly a problem of how DoT is balanced in this game).
The biggest problem for me is that most of sentinels defense layers can also be used by all the other classes, maybe its easier to build for sentinel like armor, but still all other classes have access to multiple sources of less damage taken and other defensive layers like dodge and ward that are harder to build on or that the sentinel has no access to. While other classes are still able to use and sometimes even get easy access to things like block chance and armor. Two of the big selling points of the Paladin for example is the big amount of health and resistences it gets from its passive tree and holy aura, but resistences are not a big problem most of the time on the end game and other classes/masteries also have access to a huge amount of health like druid or falconer, which only leaves paladin with maybe a good advantage on the amount of sustain it can get from its skills.
It feels like sentinel defenses for some reason are balanced around rebuke, even though no one likes it.
I know but that renders the whole thesis that there is no way to scale non crit hits completely useless. There are plenty of ways to increase damage and crit is just one of them. Sure crit is strong like it always was in every H&S game out there but crit would do almost nothing without all the other modifiers because 600% of nothing is still nothing.
So is crit strong? Yes no doubt about that.
Is there no way to scale non crit dmg? There are plenty of ways to do so.
Not really, i’m talking about things like, 100% chance to dodge that rogue has access to, Flame Ward that mages have access to, a second health pool that Lich has access to, a node that gives you -20% less damage taken while on low life that primalist has access to.
At somepoint HH sentinel was one of the builds that could generate the most obscene amounts of ward and i still didnt think of it being the tankiest build in the game.
Sentinel is tankier now, but unless you play using rebuke, i still dont think it has good denfenses when compared to other classes.
Masteries like marksman or necromancer in some circunstances might be less tanky than sentinel in general, but i argue that those classes are suposed to be squishy while a class that relly mainly on closeup combat should be more tanky.
). There’s also Salt the Wound to allow you to benefit from vrit multi.